IP lookup error handling tips?

hey everyone, following up on our chat from last week about those pesky ASN lookup issues and rate limits. we did implement exponential backoff, and honestly, that helped a ton with the general rate limit exceedance errors we were seeing. so, big thanks for that advice!

however, we're still running into a new challenge. we're seeing really inconsistent IP geolocation results, or sometimes just outright failures, especially for IPs that belong to big CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai, or even really large corporate networks. it just feels like some IPs are way harder to accurately resolve than others, and it's impacting our analytics.

here's what we've tried so far to improve IP resolution accuracy:

• we've got exponential backoff and retries in place, up to 3 times for failed lookups.
• we're caching successful IP lookup results for a short duration to reduce API calls.
• we've even experimented with using multiple geolocaion API providers as fallbacks, but this is adding a lot of complexity and obviously, cost.

here’s a snippet from our logs showing the kind of inconsistency I'm talking about:

[2023-10-27 14:35:01] ERROR: Geolocation API failed for IP: 104.28.1.1 (Cloudflare CDN) - Error: "Inconsistent location data"
[2023-10-27 14:35:05] WARN: Retrying IP: 104.28.1.1...
[2023-10-27 14:35:09] ERROR: Geolocation API failed for IP: 23.200.0.0 (Akamai Technologies) - Error: "No precise location found"
[2023-10-27 14:35:15] INFO: IP: 192.168.1.1 (Local IP) - Success: "Private Network" (as expected)

my main question is, what are the best practices or alternative strategies for really improving IP lookup reliability, especially for those tricky CDN or large enterprise IPs? are there specific geolocation API providers out there that are known for better accuracy in these specific edge cases? or maybe some techniques to infer location when a direct lookup just flat-out fails?

any tips on refining our API error handling for these specific scenarios would be super helpful. help a brother out please...